About 10 seconds. North-SouthWest Viewed facing west. Yellow/white. No sound. At least as big and bright as the moon. Started out big and solid then as it travelled it broke up into numerous smaller pieces that fizzled out. It was very, very low and fairly slow. I've never seen anything like it. Amazing!

10-15 seconds N/NE - S/SW White/yellow/gold, no sound Possibly the moon but a bit more yellow co,luring Yes, definitely fragmentation, 1 major part and the numerous trailing afterwards I am not sure what this was, defiantly had numerous fragments and wasn't moving too fast across the sky, but disappeared down to the SW of maybe Brisbane city, AUSTRALIA

Asteroid 2013 NJ is just one object on NASA's list of near-Earth objects, but it's remarkable in that it flew by significantly closer than anything else on the list. Passing by at about 2.5 times the distance to the moon, it was close enough to be visible to the naked eye, even though its diameter is relatively small at 120-260 meters.

Luckily for us, when something passes extremely close in terms of space, say 2.5 lunar distances, it's actually still a pretty large distance away in actuality. Unluckily, the size of objects is also subjected to that relative sense of scale, as something that's relatively small in space terms, say 120-260 meters, is actually pretty large if it comes hurtling towards you.

Loxahatchee, Florida - He's the walking, talking, living, breathing seven-year-old who just had a very close encounter with outer space and has the scars to prove it. Steven Lippard was playing in his family's drive way this past Saturday when his world was rocked... literally.

"My dad ran to the door and saw me bleeding from the head", said Steven.

So what left little Steven with a gash in his head seemingly from out of nowhere, at first there were a lot of theories.

"I was thinking it could be a golf ball or a bird of prey", said Steven's dad Wayne.

But in the end the answer was in the palm of their hand.

"At that point I was convinced my son was hit by a meteorite", added Wayne.

Comment: The reporter assures us that meteorites have only hit the ground "4 times in Florida's history", which may or may not be the case. In the meantime, however, according to the American Meteor Society, there have been hundreds of reports of fragmenting fireballs seen overhead, and from around the world, in just the past few months alone, including dozens over Florida.

Officially, no one has ever been killed by a meteorite, but official history is, of course, bunk:

Consumer video cameras and advanced laboratory techniques gave scientists an unprecedented opportunity to study the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February. The explosion was equivalent to about 600 thousand tonnes of TNT, 150 times bigger than the 2012 Sutter's Mill meteorite in California.

"If humanity does not want to go the way of the dinosaurs, we need to study an event like this in detail," says Qing-zhu Yin, professor in the department of earth and planetary sciences at University of California, Davis.

Saying it was a "wake-up call," Yin says the Chelyabinsk meteorite, the largest strike since the Tunguska event of 1908, belongs to the most common type of meteorite, an "ordinary chondrite." If a catastrophic meteorite strike were to occur in the future, it would most likely be an object of this type.

"Our goal was to understand all circumstances that resulted in the damaging shock wave that sent over 1,200 people to hospitals in the Chelyabinsk blast area that day," says Peter Jenniskens, meteor astronomer at SETI Institute.
Their findings are published in the journal Science.

Based on viewing angles from videos of the fireball, researchers calculated that the meteoroid entered Earth's atmosphere at just over 19 kilometres per second, slightly faster than had previously been reported.

Portland - Three weeks after a fireball lit up the morning sky in the Pacific Northwest, the FOX 12 newsroom received several photos of objects passing through the sky above Oregon. One FOX 12 viewer wrote she noticed "a strange line in the sky" in Beaverton."As it continued down, the trail behind it started to spread out as you can see in the pictures. Then it lit up like a fireball," she wrote.

Another witness on Marine Drive said he spotted three objects in the sky around 7:15 a.m."I ran inside to grab my camera after I saw the first two and when I came out this one was breaching our atmosphere," he said. Jim Todd, OMSI's director space science education, says he's looking into the reports.

Comment: Several SOTT.net editors saw something very similar on October 27th:

There are scads of building-size, potentially hazardous asteroids lurking in Earth's immediate neighborhood, and they may be colliding with the planet 10 times more often than scientists have previously believed, according to a new study published Wednesday that examined the airburst of a 25-million-pound asteroid earlier this year near the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.

Three studies released Wednesday, two in the journal Nature and one in the journal Science, have provided the most detailed description and analysis of the dramatic event on the morning of Feb. 15. Scientists now estimate the diameter of the object at just a hair under 20 meters, or about 65 feet. Undetected by astronomers, the rock came out of the glare of the sun and hit the atmosphere at 43,000 miles per hour.

As it descended through the atmosphere, it broke into fragments, creating a series of explosions with the combined energy of about 500 kilotons of TNT, making it more than 30 times more powerful than the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945, although the energy in this case was spread out over a much broader area.

The shock wave blew out windows in nearly half the buildings in Chelyabinsk. It knocked people off their feet; dozens were sunburned by the blinding flash, which at its peak was 30 times brighter than the sun. About 1,200 people were hurt, most by broken and flying glass, but no one was killed.

Comment: Here's a great book that sheds even more light on this 'ongoing problem', Laura Knight-Jadczyk's latest:

Tulsa, Oklahoma - People across Oklahoma are being treated to an amazing sight in the night sky, thanks to two comets, one familiar and one that's brand new.

The familiar one is causing the Leonid meteor shower. The shower happens every year when Earth passes through the tail of Comet Tempel-Tuttle, which was first discovered in 1865.

This year people across Oklahoma and bordering states have reported seeing brilliant meteors crashing toward Earth thanks to the Leonids. They're called that because they appear to radiate from a point in the Leo the Lion constellation.

Lake Texoma -- Bryan County residents and first responders were in for a scare Saturday night when they received reports of a plane crashing into Lake Texoma.

Grayson County received a 91-1 call last night reporting a plane crashing into Lake Texoma. After investigating, authorities found what appeared to be a fiery crash may have been a meteor falling from the sky.

When the Grayson County Sheriff's Office received a 9-11 call Saturday night reporting a plane engulfed in flames crashing into Lake Texoma. A mutli-agency investigation was launched.

According to Deputy Vinny Cacace, " Bryan County Sheriff's Office, Cartwright, Colbert fire, Colbert Police Department, Lighthorse Police Department, Emergency Management, Denison Fire of course launched on their side and Grayson County, Marshall County did the same as well."

The responding agencies used all resources available to them to locate the reported plane.